Exploring my life through the lens of a camera…

Archive for the ‘Garden’ Category

When I think of where I have dreamed my life would be it always included a family, a home and community. When I was living in Vancouver, I had the community but the home was a small apartment and I did have family. My family is quite large, most living in the Vancouver-area, and we are quite close. But that is not (only) the family that I mean. I meant my family: husband and children.

I also had trouble envisioning how having a home would work: housing prices in Vancouver are STUPID. Vancouver is a beautiful city. I love it dearly, and loved living there. But, even as a two income couple, I can’t imagine how we would be able to afford a home. Since I was curious, I went to one of the real estate websites for Vancouver and input our purchase price to see what range we would have been looking in and the choices we would have had (staying in the area I would have preferred to live – without a horrible & long commute) and I could have purchased a ~600 sq ft apartment, not unlike what I was living in before I moved. That place was TINY: perfect for me, but much too small for two of us. We are in a two bedroom apartment now ~825 sq ft and we have no space for anything. Never mind adding kids to the mix down the road.

So, life as I have written about in the past has led me to another city: we have found our dream home here, my future family will be from here and community is growing. Finally, on Feb 7th we closed on the house! To begin the steps of making the house “home”, enjoy the wood burning fireplaces (one of them at least) and give our friends a glimpse of the house in its “BEFORE” stage, we had a Housewarming S’mores Party.

The biggest gift I received was from two close friends from Vancouver, they drove down and surprised me with a visit. I have never felt so loved as watching them walk through the door. It was even better as she had called me that morning to tell me how sad she was that the party was on a Thursday and they couldn’t get off work on Friday! Sneaky friend!

The day after we closed, I had the pleasure of ripping off the ugly wood panelling off the living room wall. It was a delight to be able to begin to transform this long-unloved home into my home, OUR home, the one we will hopefully be in until we are too old to stay there.

To come: Photos. I want to find a photo sharing site where I can link (and have the photos show up as a slideshow) without uploading it directly to wordpress. I’m also hoping I can use the same link to show the photos on Facebook (so that I don’t have to organize and upload photos more than once), and I am hoping that way I can just email the link to those who don’t come to the blog or have a Facebook account (yes, they do exist). Stay tuned (and comment if you have any photo sharing site opinions… I am hoping for free).

January isn’t quite over and we aren’t in our house yet, but it is time to start planting. I have started some seeds: onions, leeks, beets, tomatoes and eggplants.

So here is a photo of Garden 2013, day one:

Stay tuned for more garden photos and updates as we progress towards my ultimate goal of eating only produce we grow. Is this an attainable goal? I am not hoping or planning to achieve this goal this year but will work towards it as time progresses.

One thing that is different between DF and myself is the number of times we’ve moved. I can count on one hand, at least right now, the number of permanent homes I’ve had (I can count on two hands if you include temporary places I’ve lived for short months here and there). DF, however, has moved so many times in his life he can hardly count them. But, we both agree that we don’t want to move a lot in our life together. So, we set out to find our ‘forever home’.

We had a few criteria for our home, and initially we weren’t expecting to ‘seriously’ look until January. But, we did feel it was important to look at places together so we would get a good handle on our likes and dislikes – we’d both looked at places in the past, but never together.

Our first trip out was quite productive and there was one place that was interesting to us. We started talking about putting in an offer, but felt as though we should look some more. It turned out that an offer was already accepted on that place. BUT, on our next trip out to look at places there was this one place. It was rough around the edges – a one owner home it is definitely ‘retro’. But, it had a LOT of potential and met our criteria

Good community feel – in an ideal world close to certain friends so we can build community together, but also within a neighborhood that is community-focused.

Quiet street – I want to feel relatively safe letting any kids we have (or friends/family’s kids) outside without one of us having to be close by at all times.

Potential for what we envision in our future – as mentioned above. We did not want a ‘starter’ home, but rather a home that could grow and expand as we need it to.

So, how well does our home fit the criteria?

Right now it takes me ~30min to drive to work. I try to walk out the door between 45-40min before I have to be there, to give me the time I need, especially with parking away from the hospital on weekdays. The new commute drops down to about 15min. The surprising thing is that this new place is only ~1mile from our current place. It’s amazing how a small distance can make a huge difference.

The place has a big, sunny, yard – it’s on a corner lot so there is lots of space and no one on one side!

The neighbors have already been quite welcoming, and are happy to have a couple move in (we are more community minded than the cranky 90 year old who lived in the house prior to us).

It’s a dead end street, and our end is apparently used for street hockey and games regularly.

There is great potential – if we need more space we can build on without losing too much yard, and with 4 bedrooms and 2 floors we have plenty of room for a long time to come!